Welcome to The Noctrium. Feel free to wander the dusty corridors of my dark art gallery or surrender your imagination to the pages of my ghost stories. Above all, enjoy your stay—and if you feel an icy touch on your back, fear not; my spectral tenants are friendly…for the most part.
Fear is one of the hardest reactions to provoke in writing. Just flip through the pages of any ghost story anthology; how many of them are genuinely scary? It takes more than tortured groans, rattling chains, and a splattering of gore; anyone can do that. But the art of raising goose bumps? That is an […]
I have never experienced the supernatural, but I know someone who has. Isn’t that always how it goes? In my case, it was a friend named Curtis. Curtis is a bookish fellow, by which I mean he’s the only person I know to have thoroughly exhausted the offerings of his local library. In fact, it […]
Do you want to give your readers goose bumps? Do you want to inspire nightmares? In this book, I share everything I’ve learned from a decade of writing ghost stories, including: The Principles of Terror Discover the basic qualities that make something scary Learn how to apply the unknown, uncanniness, subtlety, and more to your […]
Cross the Threshold, If You Dare! In the dusty corners of reality, where the darkness refuses to be banished, nightmares lurk. They wait for the curious and unfortunate to stumble out of the well-lit paths of life. Beware, for in opening this book, you part the veil and slip into the realm of the dead. […]
Prologue September 2017 Tommy Nier wakes thinking it’s still the middle of the night. If he’d look at the clock above his dresser across the room, he’d know it was 6:59 a.m., but it’s been raining all night and the stormclouds have yet to disperse. The sky outside his window is charcoal and the voice […]
by Shannen L. Colton I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. I say him, but I don’t really know. He resembles a man, but I’ve never seen his face. The first time I saw him, I thought I must have seen wrong. My son was young, only five months old; taking care of […]
The town I grew up in could boast exactly one remarkable event. The accident of 2004. It resulted in the indefinite closure of Stover Road and a stricter screening process for new bus drivers. No one ever lived on Stover Road, but it was a key stretch of pavement, linking our small town with the […]
It was some time past eleven, as far as he could guess, and Jacob was regretting the decision to ride through the night. Beside him, Phillip rode with his head bent against the wind, his dark riding cloak plastered with snow. They’d both agreed to this plan, hoping to reunite with their families all the […]
I braked at the stoplight and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. What could I do? The three appointments I’d scheduled had been fruitless. My two impromptu tours likewise. This city was just too expensive, even for the—I’d thought at the time—generous salary from my new job. But that salary was contingent on my […]